The Muslim Student Association and terror

In Onward Muslim Soldiers I quote a speaker at a Muslim Student Association meeting in New York, who said: "The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it." Now the Senate is taking notice. From Accuracy in Academia, with thanks to LGF:

The Senate Finance Committee is investigating non-profit groups to determine whether those organizations might be a source of funding for terrorist activities. Among the groups that the Committee wants Internal Revenue Service records on: the Muslim Student Association (MSA), active on campuses throughout the United States.

"Many of these groups not only enjoy tax-exempt status, but their reputations as charities and foundations often allow them to escape scrutiny, making it easier to hide and move their funds to other groups and individuals who threaten our national security," Senators Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus pointed out in their letter to the IRS.

"Often these groups are nothing more than shell companies for the same small group of people, moving funds from one charity to the next charity to hide the trail," the senators write. "These groups also receive donations from foreign sources, including countries the government has identified as having a significant problem with terrorism." . . .

Nor is this the first time the MSA has come up in a federal investigation. Last February, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents arrested Sami Omar al-Hussayen, a computer science major from the University of Idaho at Moscow. The U.S. Justice Department indictment charged Hussayen with visa fraud and the transfer of large amounts of cash from Iraq to the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA). Hussayen was head of his university's MSA, according to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The U.S. indictment also connects Hussayen with a tacit endorsement of suicide bombers posted on a web site that he registered. Hussayen, the indictment charges, registered the site exactly one year before the September 11 attacks. The posting, which appeared in June 2001, about three months before the fateful hijackings, was entitled "Provision of Suicide Operations."

Written by a radical Saudi sheikh, the posting read, "the Mujahid must kill himself if he knows that this will lead to killing a great number of the enemies, and that he will not be able to kill them without killing himself first, or demolishing a center vital to the enemy or its military force, and so on."

"This is not possible except by involving the human element in the operation. In this new era, this can be accomplished with the modern means of bombing or bringing down an airplane on an important location that will cause the enemy great losses."

By this standard, of course, 9/11 was a great victory, as it brought down airplanes on two important enemy locations.

The MSA in turn links up to other organizations that are tacitly radical. For example, MSA events frequently feature speakers from the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). Emerson told a congressional committee that "WAMY's U.S. office was incorporated in Falls Church, Virginia in 1992 by Osama bin Laden's brother, Abdullah bin Laden."

Another terrorism expert, Stephen Schwartz, told Congress that the form of Islam that governs such groups is Wahabism, the official sect in Saudi Arabia. "Shia and other non-Wahabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahabi control," Schwarz testified.

I mentioned that eighty percent figure to Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR on an MSNBC show last year and got the predictable reaction. It is good to see that the investigations are continuing despite enormous political pressure.